ty!

Trump, who’s been in office for all of a month, is “failing spectacularly to broker a peace”? When Biden did everything he could for two years to stymie peace?

This article is paywalled.

Both dudes support the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

It’s not hard for me to conceptualize nuclear great power politics, because I’ve been there before. I’m old enough to remember the world before that brief unipolar aberration, which G.H.W. Bush called the “new world order” and Fukuyama called the “end of history.”

Just a small problem of thousands of murdered eastern Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian state’s efforts to systematically suppress their political representation and erase their culture. Which is why the ICJ is investigating it for genocide.

They’re not Nazis unless they come from the Nationalsozialistische region of Deutschland. — Some German on the internet

A lil’ bit of voter suppression may also have contributed.

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: tankie ass response

• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• Al Mayadeen, 2023: Zelensky admits he never intended to implement Minsk agreements
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

Except none of that actually happened. What actually happened is that Israel slaughtered its own civilians that day.

I mean to say that, just because you don’t notice the propaganda on other instances, and in popular media in general, doesn’t mean it’s not there. You may just see it as “common sense.”

Cultural hegemony

📺 The Fascism of Common Sense

📺 Hegemony of Common Sense:Interview Of Dean Manders

Class domination is effectuated more by the mystification of consciousness—the distortion, the obfuscation, the redirection of thought and ideas—than through force or even the threat of force. Of course, force is always in the background—it’s always there. […] If you can mystify people, if you can get people to participate in their own “subjugation,” you’ll get people to become their own worst enemies, you’ve won. And you’ve won without any police forces, military forces, or whatever.

Ukraine was a pawn in a project to regime change or balkanize or isolate Russia before. Either way a pawn.

Uh-huh. Maybe learn about the history of propaganda and develop real media literacy.

• 📺 Noam Chomsky: The five filters of the mass media machine
• 📺 You’re Not Immune To Propaganda
• Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
• Edward Bernays, Propaganda
• Michael Parenti,
  • Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
  • Make-believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment
• Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

That’s not really a thing in the fediverse.

• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes

• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

I’ve always compared geopolitics to pop psychology.

NATO expansion:

• George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
• Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
• Al Mayadeen, 2023: Zelensky admits he never intended to implement Minsk agreements
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine

.
NATO in general:

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

.
Maidan coup & fascist attacks on Eastern Ukraine:

• Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
• Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
• Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

Please don’t post articles that are behind hard paywalls, or if you do, paste in the relevant parts of it.

What? China is the largest trading partner for the great majority of the world. It’s the partner of first resort.

Explain why you can’t help but make homophobic remarks that I have to remove then.

• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away